MINUTE BY MINUTE
ELLIOT RODGER’S ‘DAY OF RETRIBUTION’
INCEL ELLIOT RODGER WAS TIRED OF BEING OVERLOOKED BY THE BEAUTIFUL CALIFORNIA WOMEN HE CRAVED. SO HE PLOTTED A MASSACRE THAT WOULD MAKE “EVERYONE” PAY FOR HIS LIFETIME OF LONELINESS
For 22-year-old Elliot Rodger, life as a young adult had been a treacherous and disappointing journey. He was a virgin, had never been kissed and was desperate to have a “pretty blonde girl” on his arm to enjoy life with. Growing up, he had been a happy child living in England, later moving to Los Angeles with his mother Chin and filmmaker father Peter Rodger. The couple divorced when Elliot Rodger was a child but he still lived a privileged life. However, the one thing he wanted more than anything, which was always out of reach, was the affections of a woman. In 2011 his parents, concerned about his mental state, sent him to Isla Vista’s Santa Barbara City College – a new school and campus where he could focus on bettering himself and enjoying college life.
Since discovering that his teenage friends and peers had become sexually active, Rodger obsessed over the fact that he was still a “kissless virgin”. His hatred for humanity apparently resulted from a combination of the rejection he had suffered from women (who refused to see him as a “perfect gentleman” and a potential lover) and the “obnoxious brutes” they “gave their affection and sex and love” to instead of him. His anger boiled over in 2012 when he began to carry out a spate of petty attacks on strangers who he deemed to be flaunting their hedonistic pleasure in his face. Angry at the world for his loneliness, he began to consider “the possibility of having to carry out a violent act of revenge as the final solution to dealing with the injustices I’ve had to face at the hands of women and society”.
By the end of 2012 Rodger’s plans to punish humanity had begun. He bought his first gun and purchased other weapons over the coming months that would form part of his murderous act. He began documenting his dark thoughts on how he would exact his revenge, writing a 137-page ‘manifesto’ and vlogging his frustrations on YouTube. A common cold thwarted his initial plans to carry out the attack on 26 April 2014 and he instead settled on the final weekend before spring break for his “Day of Retribution”.
Concerned when she came across her son’s angst-ridden videos, Rodger’s mother initiated a welfare check on her son on 30 April 2014. Officers called round to Rodger to enquire about his vlog, but he coyly deflected concerns and promised to remove the videos. Unaware that they were standing within metres of the weapons Rodger intended to use in his planned attack, as
